Decluttering for Improved Mental Health Part 1: The Hurdles of Clutter

“Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” ―

Albert Einstein

Improving my physical and mental health is one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2024. My first attempt at fulfilling this promise is to remove the elements that induce stress and anxiety. The biggest culprit I have been battling lately is clutter.

I used to walk into my home and feel a sense of joy and peace. Everything looked relatively clean, pretty, and cozy. Lately, however, I found myself walking into my home feeling less at ease, and I could not explain why until I noticed how every surface had a collection of stuff on it. Also, the kitchen cabinets were overstocked with spices and herbs, the pantry shelves were overflowing so much that I had items sitting on top of the washer and dryer, the coat rack was overstuffed, the mail basket was overflowing, and the television console shelves were overloaded.

Overall, I felt overstimulated after an entire workday of overstimulation. It was time to declutter.

Clutter Impacts Our Mental Health

Clutter has been proven to have a negative effect on our bodies. Physical “environments significantly influence our cognition, emotions, and subsequent behaviors, including our relationships with others” (Sander, 2019).

Furthermore, clutter and disorganization can have negative effects on our brains because “the capacity of the visual system to process information about multiple objects at any given moment in time is limited” (McMains and Kastner, 2011). In other words, we can only visually process a certain number of things at a time; the more disorganized an environment is, the more stress it puts on our receptors.

I noticed the manifestation of this stress every time I walked into my house. Our loft is probably the cleanest room in the house, which is funny because it is where my husband and I spend the majority of our time. In the grand scheme of things, it also makes sense because it is where we are most relaxed. I just need to spread that same energy throughout the rest of our home.

Fear of Hoarding

My husband constantly assures me that our house is not a mess, but I do have anxieties about our home appearing cluttered, messy, and unlivable. This is exacerbated by feelings of guilt when I have gone too long without cleaning due to my workload.

In psychology, hoarding is the overwhelming desire to continually accumulate items accompanied by the inability to discard items perceived as useless (Merriam Webster, 2024). Discarding, and even the thought of discarding, these items typically comes with great distress and collections can impact a person’s health, relationships, and career (Merriam-Webster, 2024).

I do feel as though I hold on to a lot of items for dear life, despite them having no positive effect on me. Yet, one of my biggest fears is to end up with a house that looks ripe for the show Hoarders. But, I have also lately gotten sick of the amount items accumulated in our home―particularly the items I never see. I had tried to declutter back in the summer of 2023 during my renovations, but life took some turns and I ended up renovating without properly removing most of the junk in our house.

Decluttering is a long process, so I decided not to burn myself out with an all-day overhaul, and instead tackle my home in sections and segments.

Inspiration for Decluttering

I was highly inspired by many minimalist YouTubers to help me get into the mood for tackling my clutter. I often watch A to Zen Life and Jhánneu, but I will also sometimes watch videos by Ruby Lee Dove II to put me in the proper mindset.

A to Zen Life has a wonderful video about her journey where she talks about how she decluttered thirty years’ worth of items. She does not push extreme minimalism where some opt for completely empty houses (Kim Kardashian’s beige house, for example, scares me), but rather inspires us to use and enjoy the items that we already have, and remove the items that add no value to our lives. She emphasizes that “Minimalism is a spectrum.” I love her interpretation because she never makes her viewers feel bad about what they own.

Jhánneu takes a stand against wasteful living. Her videos combine minimalism with zero waste strategies to help reduce the harmful impacts our purchases have on the environment. Even though it should never be solely the consumer’s responsibility to act in a greener way (since corporations make it nearly impossible for us all to be waste free), it is both comforting and better for our living spaces to use less plastic, purchase fewer clothes, and be more money conscious.

1. Respect your starting point – We all have to start somewhere, and each of our starting points are different. We will all have different ways that we can comfortably declutter, and no one’s beginning and ending will be the same.
2. Detach the emotion from the material – Even though some items have sentimental value, you do not need to keep EVERYTHING that has sentimental value. Some items do not actually change whether or not you miss a person, and can even make you feel worse.
3. Keep the items that add value to your life – Keep and maintain the items that you love as opposed to items you are on the fence on.
4. If you are not grateful for what you have, then you will not be grateful for having more – We sometimes fill our homes with as many material things that we can because we think it will complete us. But, this hole is rarely if ever fulfilled if we continue to feel dissatisfied, angry, and miserable.

My Strategy for Tackling Clutter

I am trying to be more liberal with my decluttering this year, so I really dug deep down into my closets, bins, and drawers and took a hard and realistic look at myself and my stuff. My thought process went a little like this:

• Why do I own this?
• What is the item’s condition?
• How often do I use this?
• Does it work with my current lifestyle?
• Do I LOVE it?

The plan is to tackle part of a room every one to two days, three max. I don’t have to spend too much time decluttering (30 minutes to an hour), but just enough to get rid of excess stuff.

We will see how this will work in the upcoming months.

References

Merriam-Webster, (2024). Hoarding. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hoarding

McMains S, Kastner S. Interactions of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in human visual cortex. J Neurosci. 2011 Jan 12;31(2):587-97. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3766-10.2011. PMID: 21228167; PMCID: PMC3072218.

Sander, L., (2019). What does clutter do to your brain and body? News GP. Retrieved from https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/what-does-clutter-do-to-your-brain-and-body